Flowers and People, Cannot be Controlled but Live Together – A Whole Year per Hour

This artwork is in a state of continuous change. Over a period of one hour, a year’s worth of seasonal flowers blossoms and scatters.

The flowers bud, grow, and blossom before their petals begin to wither and eventually fade away. The cycle of growth and decay repeats itself in perpetuity. The flowers are interactive; depending on the proximity of the viewer to the work, or if the viewer touches the flowers, they simultaneously come to life or shed their petals, wither, and die all at once.

The artwork is not a pre-recorded image that is played back: it is created by a computer program that continuously renders the work in real time. The interaction between people and the installation causes continuous change in the artwork: previous visual states can never be replicated, and will never reoccur. The picture at this moment can never be seen again.

In spring in the Kunisaki Peninsula, there are many cherry blossoms in the mountains and canola blossoms at their base. This experience of nature caused teamLab to wonder how many of these flowers were planted by people and how many were native to the environment. It is a place of great serenity and contentment, but the expansive body of flowers is an ecosystem influenced by human intervention, and the boundary between the work of nature and the work of humans is unclear. Rather than nature and humans being in conflict, a healthy ecosystem is one that includes people. In the past, people understood that they could not grasp nature in its entirety, and that it is not possible to control nature. People lived more closely aligned to the rules of nature that created a comfortable natural environment. Before the modern era, civilization prospered by the sea. Since then, it has moved inland, leaving isolated pockets of people in the solitary valleys. We believe that these valleys hold faint traces of this premodern relationship with nature that once existed.